WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration appears to have almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.
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New standards concerning access to key medicines appear to be equally problematic for many nations.
The Obama administration is insisting on mandating new intellectual property rules in the treaty that would grant pharmaceutical companies long-term monopolies on new medications. As a result, companies can charge high prices without regard to competition from generic providers. The result, public health experts have warned, would be higher prices around the world, and lack of access to life-saving drugs in poor countries. Nearly every intellectual property issue in the November chart is opposed by a broad majority of the 12 nations. The December memo describes 119 "outstanding issues" that remain unresolved between the nations on intellectual property matters. The deal would obligate nations to develop many standards similar to those in the United States, where domestic prescription drug prices are much higher than costs in other nations.
Obama Faces Backlash Over New Corporate Powers In Secret Trade Deal
Obama is and has been nothing but a corporatist shill.
'Hope and change' my ass.
Mornin BAC. :2wave: Here is some more insight into the play with the Corporatism.
The Democrats' Authoritarian Health "Reform" Bill and the Ascendency of Corporatism in the Democratic Party
"[Obama and Clinton] Democrats learned never to go to war against the combined forces of corporate America. Today, whether it is on the stimulus, on health care, or any other issue, the Obama administration and the Congressional leadership go out of their way to court corporate interests, to win corporate support and to at least divide corporate opposition."
The differences between progressive New Deal liberals -- what Howard Dean termed the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- and corporatist liberals or "New Democrats" were largely papered over for the past 8 years by common opposition to the free market absolutism and neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush administration. In terms of health care reform, they were papered over by the hopes of many progressive liberals -- who were willing to give up fighting for Medicare-For-All as politically "impractical" -- of achieving a robust public option as an acceptable compromise in the context of a larger health insurance mandate.
For many of these progressive liberals, the idea of the public option, at least at the beginning,
was that it would be so large and successful that it would prove the superiority of government-run health insurance over private profit-driven health insurance and would eventually evolve into a single payer system. They watched, with increasing concern, as a large and robust public option was first turned by House Democrats into a small and puny public option that would insure only a handful of Americans and provide little competition to private insurers,
and then as the public option was dumped entirely by Senate Democrats, with no help by President Obama to defend it.
As a result, the past two weeks have seen a revolt from much of the progressive base of the Democratic Party, articulated by people like Howard Dean, Marcos Moulitsas, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, and by organizations like MoveOn, The AFL-CIO, SEIU, and Progressive Democrats of America.
The ideological fault line between progressive Democrats and corporatist "New Democrats" has split wide open.
Obama campaigned, at least on the level of political imagery,
as a progressive liberal.
His campaign slogan was "Yes We Can", taken directly from the '60's era slogan of Cesar Chavez and The United Farm Workers Union, "Si Se Puede". He evoked the imagery of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. He talked about overthrowing the influence of special interests and lobbyists and transforming the way Washington does business. He promised transformative "Change" (although, as some critics pointed out at the time, he left the direction of "Change" so vague that voters of various stripes could read what they wanted into it). That's why a majority of progressive Democrats supported Obama over Hillary Clinton in the primaries, particularly after the more populist John Edwards withdrew.
They didn't want to see a return to the centrism, corporatism, and triangulation of Clintonism.
But from the moment he was elected,
Obama has governed not as a progressive liberal but as a corporatist liberal. Progressive liberals hoped Obama would be like FDR. Instead,
he's been like Bill Clinton on steroids.
Obama's economic advisors, such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner,
were all drawn from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. His foreign policy advisors were all liberal hawks like Hillary Clinton or even Bush administration veterans like Robert Gates. From day one, Obama continued Wall Street Republican Hank Paulson's financial policies of throwing money at the banks while demanding next to nothing in return in terms of making credit available to average Americans and small businesses or creating new jobs.
When it came to health care "reform",
Obama's strategy was to cut deals with for-profit health care corporations. He cut a deal with big Pharma to continue banning Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices and to continue banning consumers from buying cheaper drugs from Canada. He cut a deal with the for-profit hospital industry that there would be no effective national public option that might pay them lower rates that the for-profit insurance oligopoly. While he gave mild rhetorical support to the public option, he did nothing to actually fight for it , and, as Russ Feingold has pointed out, Joe Lieberman was really doing Obama's work in killing it.
Because of Obama's rhetorical and imaging skills, it has taken until the past week or two, with the death of the public option, for progressives to begin to wonder whether Obama was really their friend. And what's most remarkable, by teasing them with the hopes of a public option,
he's so far held onto the vote of virtually every Congressional liberal for an essentially authoritarian corporatist health care bill......snip~
Miles Mogulescu: The Democrats' Authoritarian Health "Reform" Bill and the Ascendency of Corporatism in the Democratic Party
